Jana's (13a) language study travel

My language study travel to London in summer 2018

Since my interest in travelling has always been very great, I decided at the beginning of 2018 that I wanted to go to London. After a lot of thinking I decided to go on a language trip, because this would be a good exercise for the “English Abitur”.

In the summer holidays 2018 I started my one-and-a-half-hour flight from Hamburg to London. Already from the plane you can see the beauty of the city, as the plane flies directly over the River Thames and the city centre. Arriving in London I went straight to my "host family", a 24 year old girl who had just graduated university.

My host family as well as my school were located in Greenwich - a small suburb. At the beginning I was very nervous and excited as it will be two weeks alone in a new city on a new school with many new students from all over the world. However, my worries soon subsided and on the first day of school I met two nice girls from Asia and Slovenia. In my class there were also students from Italy, France, Russia, Poland and even Brazil. They also took a placement test on the first day of school. Unfortunately I was placed on the wrong level at the beginning, but directly on the second day I was able to advance to the next level thanks to my teacher. The other teachers were also very nice and made a lot of jokes with us. During the lessons only little is written, but a lot is spoken. Every afternoon I went straight home from school, took off my schoolbag, packed my camera and drove to downtown London. Fortunately, the heat wave had arrived in London as well as in Germany and I could see everything on foot and had to use the subway only rarely. For example, on my sightseeing tour on the first day I visited 4 museums and walked 27 km through the city.

You can talk to your classmates very well. At the beginning I was a bit shy and afraid to make mistakes, but that soon subsided when I noticed that we all made mistakes and still managed to communicate very well. The school also offered very cool activities every afternoon, where most of the students signed up, like the one afternoon at Madame Tussauds, where we had a lot of fun.

Although two weeks were not enough to really see progress, London was a great experience for me and definitely showed me that I was independent enough to travel alone and that I could do it! If you are interested in a language course, have any questions or similar, please feel free to contact me on Facebook or in the school corridor.

Jana-Shaline Hansen, 13a